Overview

Hold a basketball under water, take your hand away, and it’ll surface with the powerhouse force of the suppressed. Welcome to Lidia Yuknavitch’s world. In Dora: A Headcase, Yuknavitch reimagines the girl, the woman, at the heart of Sigmund Freud’s breakthrough case study and unleashes this character's fury against a backdrop of hypocritical adulthood. Yuknavitch is talking back to a hundred years, to the founding of psychoanalysis. I’d like to think she wrote parts of this novel just for me, but so many readers ...

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This Book

Overview

Hold a basketball under water, take your hand away, and it’ll surface with the powerhouse force of the suppressed. Welcome to Lidia Yuknavitch’s world. In Dora: A Headcase, Yuknavitch reimagines the girl, the woman, at the heart of Sigmund Freud’s breakthrough case study and unleashes this character's fury against a backdrop of hypocritical adulthood. Yuknavitch is talking back to a hundred years, to the founding of psychoanalysis. I’d like to think she wrote parts of this novel just for me, but so many readers will feel that way. Yuknavitch has wrestled with the force of her own convictions and given a powerful voice to a badass character born on the literary landscape. MONICA DRAKE author of Clown Girl

Dora is too much for Sigmund Freud but she’s just right for us—raunchy, sharp and so funny it hurts. KATHERINE DUNN author of Geek Love

In these times there's no reason for a novel to exist unless it's dangerous, provocative and not like anything that's come before. Dora: A Headcase is that kind of novel. It's dirty, sexy, rude, smart, soulful, fresh and risky. Think of your favorite out-there genius writer; multiply by ten, add a big heart, a poet's ear, and a bad girl's courage, and you've got Lidia Yuknavitch. KAREN KARBO, author of How Georgia Became O'Keeffe

Dora: A Head Case is first and foremost an irreverent portrait of a smart seventeen year old trying to survive. It channels Sigmund Freud and his young patient Dora and is both a hilarious critique and an oddly touching homage. With an unerring ear and a very keen eye, Lidia Yuknavitch casts a very special slant of light on our centuries and our lives. Put simply, the book is needed. CAROLE MASO author of Defiance and The Art Lover

Snappy and fun. I can pretty much guarantee you haven't met a character quite l like Ida before. BLAKE NELSON author of Girl and Paranoid Park

In Dora, [Lidia Yuknavitch] takes the most classic model of Thera-tainment, personal-crisis-as-content, and she re-imagines it wonderfully reversed. The world of Dora is not just possible, it’s inevitable. It’s revenge as the ultimate therapy. From the introduction by CHUCK PALAHNIUK author of Damned

When about to plummet to our deaths or fly we speak in a language all our own. Dora: A Headcase is a feminist retelling of Freud’s famous case study, Dora. But the novel constantly transcends this conceit in beautiful and surprising ways. Sure there’s literary discourse and feminist asides, feats of craft and vision, but in the end Yuknavitch drives narrative the way rednecks drive muscle cars. Right across your lawn without respect to boundaries. If Ida is a little scary to some readers, it’s only because we’ve forgotten that nothing is scarier than a teenage girl. They whisper things we don’t want to hear— that sometimes cutting is an act of freedom, like meditating without sleep, or starving yourself for the parallel bars. Also, that it’s damn hard to do the right thing when you’re in a dangerous conversation with the universe, one meant for god’s ears alone.

Personally as someone whose teen years were hellish, I was floored by the softness and raw sorrow in Ida’s voice, which Yuknavitch braided in with the anger. It felt more real, more like the girls I knew and was, than any other coming of age narrator. Put simply, Yuknavitch has written the best portrait of teen girlhood I have ever read. I loved this book—it’s like a smart, fast chick Fight Club. In twenty years, I hope to wake up in a world where Dora: A Headcase has replaced Catcher in the Rye on high school reading lists for the alienated. I’m pretty sure that world would be a better one. VANESSA VESELKA, author of Zazen

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In Yuknavitch’s audacious first novel, equal parts acid-tongued coming-of-age story and feminist retelling of Freud’s most famous case study, Seattle teen Ida goes toe-to-toe with her new shrink, nicknamed Siggy, recording their conversations (among other things) with the recorder she’s hidden in her Dora the Explorer purse. At home, her father is having an affair with Mrs. K. (Mr. K., true to Freud’s model, propositioned Ida when she was 14) and her mother is drinking herself into oblivion. In therapy, mandated by her father, Ida, nimble as a boxer, counters Siggy every time he brings up his favorite topic: sex. Sex is the one thing that Ida hasn’t experienced yet, though she’s desperately in love with her friend, Obsidian, but whenever the girls go beyond kissing, Ida either faints or loses her voice (cue Freud again). Along with Obsidian, Ida and the rest of her posse stage “art attacks” around the city, culminating in their most daring one yet following a recorded conversation between Siggy and a mysterious man—with unforeseen consequences. Yuknavitch (the memoir The Chronology of Water) nails the whip-smart angst of a teenage girl trapped in a world both familiar and unique, and her ease with language makes her a prose stylist to envy. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Praise for Lidia Yuknavitch's DORA: A HEADCASE:

"Hold a basketball under water, take your hand away, and it’ll surface with the powerhouse force of the suppressed. Welcome to Lidia Yuknavitch’s world. In Dora: A Headcase, Yuknavitch reimagines the girl, the woman, at the heart of Sigmund Freud’s breakthrough case study and unleashes this character's fury against a backdrop of hypocritical adulthood. Yuknavitch is talking back to a hundred years, to the founding of psychoanalysis. I’d like to think she wrote parts of this novel just for me, but so many readers will feel that way. Yuknavitch has wrestled with the force of her own convictions and given a powerful voice to a badass character born on the literary landscape."
—MONICA DRAKE author of Clown Girl

"Dora is too much for Sigmund Freud but she’s just right for us—raunchy, sharp and so funny it hurts."
—KATHERINE DUNN author of Geek Love

"In these times there's no reason for a novel to exist unless it's dangerous, provocative and not like anything that's come before. Dora: A Headcase is that kind of novel. It's dirty, sexy, rude, smart, soulful, fresh and risky. Think of your favorite out-there genius writer; multiply by ten, add a big heart, a poet's ear, and a bad girl's courage, and you've got Lidia Yuknavitch."
—KAREN KARBO, author of How Georgia Became O'Keeffe

"Dora: A Headcase is first and foremost an irreverent portrait of a smart seventeen year old trying to survive. It channels Sigmund Freud and his young patient Dora and is both a hilarious critique and an oddly touching homage. With an unerring ear and a very keen eye, Lidia Yuknavitch casts a very special slant of light on our centuries and our lives. Put simply, the book is needed."
—CAROLE MASO author of Defiance and The Art Lover

"Snappy and fun. I can pretty much guarantee you haven't met a character quite l like Ida before."
—BLAKE NELSON author of Girl and Paranoid Park

"In Dora, [Lidia Yuknavitch] takes the most classic model of Thera-tainment, personal-crisis-as-content, and she re-imagines it wonderfully reversed. The world of Dora is not just possible, it’s inevitable. It’s revenge as the ultimate therapy."
—From the introduction by CHUCK PALAHNIUK author of Damned

"When about to plummet to our deaths or fly we speak in a language all our own. Dora: A Headcase is a feminist retelling of Freud’s famous case study, Dora. But the novel constantly transcends this conceit in beautiful and surprising ways. Sure there’s literary discourse and feminist asides, feats of craft and vision, but in the end Yuknavitch drives narrative the way rednecks drive muscle cars. Right across your lawn without respect to boundaries. If Ida is a little scary to some readers, it’s only because we’ve forgotten that nothing is scarier than a teenage girl. They whisper things we don’t want to hear— that sometimes cutting is an act of freedom, like meditating without sleep, or starving yourself for the parallel bars. Also, that it’s damn hard to do the right thing when you’re in a dangerous conversation with the universe, one meant for god’s ears alone. Personally as someone whose teen years were hellish, I was floored by the softness and raw sorrow in Ida’s voice, which Yuknavitch braided in with the anger. It felt more real, more like the girls I knew and was, than any other coming of age narrator. Put simply, Yuknavitch has written the best portrait of teen girlhood I have ever read. I loved this book—it’s like a smart, fast chick Fight Club. In twenty years, I hope to wake up in a world where Dora: A Headcase has replaced Catcher in the Rye on high school reading lists for the alienated. I’m pretty sure that world would be a better one."
—VANESSA VESELKA, author of Zazen

"These fierce life stories gleam, fiery images passing just beneath the surface of the pages."
—DIANA ABU-JABER, author of Origin: A Novel

"The kind of book Janis Joplin might have written if she had made it through the fire - raw, tough, pure, more full of love than you thought possible and sometimes even hilarious. This is the book Lidia Yuknavitch was put on the planet to write for us."
—REBECCA BROWN, author of The Gifts of the Body

"...All sex scenes were shit, except for the sex written by Lidia Yuknavitch."
—FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY CHELSEA CAIN, New York Bestseller and author of Evil at Heart

"Reading this book is like diving into Yuknavitch's most secret places, where, really, we all want memoir to take us, but it so rarely does. The reader emerges wiser, enlightened, and changed."
—KERRY COHEN, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

"The book is extraordinary."
—CHUCK PALAHNIUK, author of Pygmy

"The book is immensely impressive to me on a human level."
—DAVID SHIELDS, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

"This is the book I've been waiting to read all of my life."
—CHERYL STRAYED, author of Wild

"This isn't a memoir ‘about’ addiction, abuse, or love: it's a triumphantly unrelenting look at a life buoyed by the power of the written word."
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"Hot, gritty, unrelenting."
—DEBRA GWARTNEY, The Oregonian

"Artfully described in prose that’s as spare and beautiful as a diver slicing through the water."
—FOREWORD REVIEWS

"Her sharp prose-witty, jarring, worthy of dogearing- alternates between gleeful postmodern exercise and wrenching elegy. So honest and unapologetic is her writing that you can practically hear her sigh in catharsis as you turn the pages."
—MOLLY LABELL, Bust

"The Chronology of Water is powerful and beautifully written—even the tough parts.
—BRIDGET KINSELLA, Shelf Awareness

"Yuknavitch’s nonlinear memoir that is at times lyrical, at times conversational, and almost always intense."
—ANCA SZIAGYI, Ploughsares

"It's war in there. I'm going back in."
—JEN GRAVES, The Stranger

"It's a sputteringly good read."
—ALISON BARKER, Chicago Reader

"It's worth your attention."
—ALISON HALLETT, The Portland Mercury

"Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water might well turn out to be the best book of the year; it's unlike anything I've read before, and I haven't been able to forget it."
—MICHAEL SCHAUB, Bookslut

"One of the strongest memoirs I have had the pleasure to encounter. Don’t miss this book."
—DAVID ATKINSON, The Rumpus

"I'm not sure I've ever had such a powerful, complex reaction to a book. The Chronology of Water is astonishingly beautiful, and, as a writer, Yuknavitch is a force. Her writing hits you, hard. It rocks you. She knocked me over with passages so brilliant, so true, I had to reread them over and over until I could bear to let them go in order to move on to the next paragraph."
—MEGAN ZABEL, Powell’s Books

"I cannot fathom of a list of the ten best books of the year that does not include Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water . . . one of the most stunning books I’ve ever read and undoubtedly the best book I read in 2011."
—ROXANE GAY, The Rumpus

"Her language, inventive and sparse, is determined to leave its readers spinning in realness, the physical grit of being present as a woman and as a human being."
—NINA LARY, Bitch

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH IS THE AUTHOR of The Chronology of Water: A Memoir and three works of short fiction: Her Other Mouths, Liberty’s Excess, and Real to Reel, as well as a book of literary criticism, Allegories of Violence.

Her work has appeared in Ms., The Iowa Review, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Fiction International, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. Her book Real to Reel was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and she is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Poets and Writers and Literary Arts, Inc. Her work appears in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Forms At War (FC2), Wreckage of Reason (Spuytin Duyvil). Yuknavitch teaches writing, literature, film, and Women’s Studies in Oregon.

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Customer Reviews

Anonymous

Posted June 17, 2013

Okay

This book was a decent read in my opinion. I think for younger psych students it may broaden understanding on the original case study by Freud. I found the second half long and kind of boring. I also found myself not sold on how this author portrays teenagers, as a 21 year old it felt far off from the voices of seventeen year olds. I will probably never re- visit this novel, however I don't feel as though it was necessarily time wasted.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted December 22, 2012

I could not put this book down. It is down and dirty and is very

I could not put this book down. It is down and dirty and is very realistic look inside the head of a teenager growing up in a dysfunctional family with a philandering father, a drunken mother, and the husband of her father's mistress trying to seduce her.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted April 17, 2014

I Also Recommend:

This was the best thing I've read in years. I felt revitalized b

This was the best thing I've read in years. I felt revitalized by the honesty and clarity of Dora's storytelling. It was glorious to find something so good, such a reward after sifting through all that Patterson/Picault level drek out there, just looking for one true voice. Read it now!

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Anonymous

Posted April 14, 2014

Ally

Kissed Aido and disappears back to vt

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Anonymous

Posted April 14, 2014

Tartarus

"Fine. But one kinute!!!" Disappears

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Anonymous

Posted April 14, 2014

Aido

Sighs and goes to vt

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Anonymous

Posted December 20, 2013

Nevaeh Moore

0128

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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melanie_with_the_eyes

Posted July 28, 2013

A book that pushes events to the brink of what we consider to be

A book that pushes events to the brink of what we consider to be almost too unbelievable, but not quite. By walking a line of entertainment versus psych issues affecting troubled youth, the story sucked me in. The descriptions of Seattle's underbelly are surprisingly well-written and on target. Great purchase.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted April 14, 2013

Elijah

Sure he gives her a mosoge then falls asleep

0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted August 8, 2012

Can you be my friend

I need a friend

0 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

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